Chapter 8. Modifications

1

   He put Bobbi on the couch and went quickly to the telephone. He picked it up, meaning to dial 0 and ask the operator what number he should dial to get the nearest rescue unit. Bobbi needed a trip to the Derry Home Hospital and right away. A breakdown, Gardener supposed (although in truth he was so tired and confused that he hardly knew what to think). Some kind of breakdown. Bobbi Anderson seemed like the last person in the world to go over the top, but apparently she had.
   Bobbi said something from the couch. Gardener didn't catch it at first; Bobbi's voice was little more than a harsh croak.
   'What, Bobbi?'
   'Don't call anybody,' Bobbi said. She managed a little more volume this time, but even that much effort seemed to nearly exhaust her. Her cheeks were flushed, the rest of her face waxen, and her eyes were as bright and feverish as blue gemstones -diamonds, or sapphires, perhaps. 'Don't … Gard, not anybody!'
   Anderson fell back against the couch, panting rapidly. Gardener hung up the telephone and went to her, alarmed. Bobbi needed a doctor, that was obvious, and Gardener meant to get her one … but right now Bobbi's obvious agitation seemed more important.
   'I'll stay right with you,' he said, taking her hand, 'if that's what's worrying you. God knows you stuck with me through enough sh – '
   But Anderson had been shaking her head with mounting vehemence. 'Just need sleep,' she whispered. 'Sleep … and food in the morning. Mostly sleep. Haven't had any … three days. Four, maybe.'
   Gardener looked at her, shocked again. He put together what Bobbi had just said with the way she looked.
   'What rocket have you been riding?'– and why? his mind added. 'Bennies? Reds?' He thought of coke and then rejected it. Bobbi could undoubtedly afford coke if she wanted it, but Gardener didn't think even 'basing could keep a man or woman awake for three or four days and melt better than thirty pounds off in – Gardener calculated the time since he had last seen Anderson – in no more than three weeks.
   'No dope,' Bobbi said. 'No drugs.' Her eyes rolled and glittered. Spit
   drizzled helplessly from the corners of her mouth and she sucked it back. For an instant Gardener saw an expression in Bobbi's face he didn't like . . . one that scared him a little. It was an Anne expression. Old and crafty. Then Bobbi's eyes slipped closed, revealing lids stained the delicate purplish color of total exhaustion. When she opened her eyes again it was just Bobbi lying there … and Bobbi needed help.
   'I'm going to phone for the rescue unit,' Gardener said, getting up again. 'You look really unwell, B – '
   Bobbi's thin hand reached out and caught his wrist as Gardener turned to the phone. It held him with surprising strength. He looked down at Bobbi, and although she still looked terribly exhausted and almost desperately wasted, that feverish glitter was gone from her eyes. Now her gaze was straight and clear and sane.
   'If you call anybody,' she said, her voice still wavering a little but almost normal, 'we're done being friends, Gard. I mean that. Call the rescue unit, or Derry Home, even old Doc Warwick in town, and that's the end of the line for us. You'll never see the inside of my house again. The door will be closed to you.'
   Gardener looked at Bobbi with mounting dismay and horror. If he could have persuaded himself in that moment that Bobbi was delirious, he would gladly have done so … but she obviously wasn't.
   'Bobbi you – ' – don't know what you're saying? But she did; that was the horror of it. She was threatening to end their friendship if Gardener didn't do what she wanted, using their friendship as a club for the first time in all the years Gardener had known her. And there was something else in Bobbi Anderson's eyes: the knowledge that her friendship was maybe the last thing on earth that Gardener valued.
   Would it make any difference if I told you how much you look like your sister, Bobbi?
   No – he saw in her face nothing would make any difference.
   ' – don't know how bad you look,' he finished lamely.
   'No,' Anderson agreed, and a ghost of a smile surfaced on her face. 'I got an idea, though, believe me. Your face … better than any mirror. But, Gard – sleep is all I need. Sleep and . . .' Her eyes slipped shut again, and she opened them with an obvious effort. 'Breakfast,' she finished. 'Sleep and breakfast.'
   'Bobbi, that isn't all you need.'
   'No.' Bobbi's hand had not left Gardener's wrist and now it tightened again. 'I need you. I called for you. With my mind. And you heard, didn't you?'
   'Yes,' Gardener said uncomfortably. 'I guess I did.'
   'Gard . . .' Bobbi's voice slipped off. Gard waited, his mind in a turmoil. Bobbi needed medical help … but what she had said about ending their friendship if Gardener called anyone …
   The soft kiss she put in the middle of his dirty palm surprised him. He
   looked at her, startled, looked at her huge eyes. The fevered glitter had left them; all he saw in them now was pleading.
   'Wait until tomorrow,' Bobbi said. 'If I'm not better tomorrow … a thousand times better … I'll go. All right?'
   'Bobbi – '
   'All right?' The hand tightened, demanding Gardener to say it was.
   'Well … I guess .
   'Promise me.'
   'I promise.' Maybe, Gardener added mentally. If you don't go to sleep and then start to breathe funny. If I don't come over and check you around midnight and see your lips look like you've been eating blueberries. If you don't pitch a fit.
   This was silly. Dangerous, cowardly … but most of all just silly. He had come out of the big black tornado convinced that killing himself would be the best way to end all of his misery and ensure that he caused no more misery in others. He had meant to do it; he knew that was so. He had been on the edge of jumping into that cold water. Then his conviction that Bobbi was in trouble
   (I called and you heard didn't you)
   had come and he was here. Now, ladies and gentlemen, he seemed to hear Allen Ludden saying in his quick, light, quizmaster's voice, here is your toss-up question. Ten points if you can tell me why Jim Gardener cares about Bobbi Anderson's threat to end their friendship, when Gardener himself means to end it by committing suicide? What? No one? Well, here's a surprise! I don't know, either!
   'Okay,' Bobbi was saying. 'Okay, great.'
   The agitation which had almost been terror slipped away – the fast gasping for breath slowed and some of the color faded from her cheeks. So the promise had been worth something, at least.
   'Sleep, Bobbi.' He would sit up and watch for any change. He was tired, but he could drink coffee (and take one or two of whatever Bobbi'd been taking, if he came across them). He owed Bobbi a night's watching. There were nights when she had watched over him. 'Sleep now.' He gently disengaged his wrist from Bobbi's hand.
   Her eyes closed, then slowly opened one last time. She smiled, a smile so sweet that he was in love with her again. She had that power over him. 'Just … like old times, Gard.'
   'Yeah, Bobbi. Like old times.'
   'I … love you .
   'I love you too. Sleep.'
   Her breathing deepened. Gardener sat beside her for three minutes, then five, watching that madonna smile, becoming more and more convinced she was asleep. Then, very slowly, Bobbi's eyes struggled open again.
   'Fabulous,' she whispered.
   'What?' Gardener leaned forward. He wasn't sure what she'd said.
   'What it is … what it can do … what it will do
   She's talking in her sleep, Gardener thought, but he felt a recurrence of the chill. That crafty expression was back in Bobbi's face. Not on it but in it, as if it had grown under the skin.
   'You should have found it … I think it was for you, Gard
   'What was?'
   'Look around the place,' Bobbi said. Her voice was fading. 'You'll see. We'll finish digging it up together. You'll see it solves the … problems … all the problems . . .'
   Gardener had to lean forward now to hear anything. 'What does, Bobbi?'
   'Look around the place,' Bobbi repeated, and the last word drew out, deepening, and became a snore. She was asleep.

2

   Gardener almost went to the phone again. It was close. He got up, but halfway across the living room he diverted, going to Bobbi's rocking chair instead. He would watch for a while first, he thought. Watch for a while and try to think what all this might mean.
   He swallowed and winced at the pain in his throat. He was feverish, and he suspected the fever was no little one-degree job, either. He felt more than unwell; he felt unreal.
   Fabulous … what it is … what it can do …
   He would sit here for a while and think some more. Then he would make a pot of strong coffee and dump about six aspirins into it. That would take care of the aches and fever, at least temporarily. Might help keep him awake, too.
   … what it will do …
   Gard closed his eyes, dozing himself. That was all right. He might doze, but not for long; he'd never been able to sleep sitting up. And Peter was apt to appear at any time; he would see his old friend Gard, jump into his lap, and get his balls. Always. When it came to jumping into the chair with you and getting your balls, Peter never failed. Hell of an alarm clock, if you happened to be sleeping. Five minutes, that's all. Forty winks. No harm, no foul.
   You should have found it. I think it was for you, Gard …
   He drifted, and his doze quickly deepened into sleep so deep it was close to coma.

3

   shusshhhhh …
   He's looking down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow, hypnotized by their liquid speed. He doesn't realize this state of near hypnosis
   until a voice on his left says: 'One thing you bastards never remember to mention at your fucking Communist antipower rallies is just this: in thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, we've never been caught once.
   Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater over faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.
   'You're going to crash,' a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle– Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.
   'That's right,' he says. 'I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance.'
   The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.
   'I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive,' Arglebargle says.
   'No,' Gardener whispers. This … this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable, drunken act.
   'Yes,' the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. 'I invited you into my house, gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument.'
   'Please … I. . .'
   'You what? You what?' from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. 'You nothing, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?'
   'You killed me,' Arberg drones from his right, 'but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener.'
   'Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?' Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last advanced stages of radiation sickness.
   The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.
   'You'll crash, you bet,' Arglebargle drones on. 'Crash.'
   He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked 'My land! I NEVER!' And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup. Then beginning to weep as he was now.
   'As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in.' Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. 'But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since … oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon.'
   'No … no . . .'
   'You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest,' Arberg drones. 'Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash … crash … crash!'
   How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the big, hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks: Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?
   He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk … and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming, mouth and

4

   he doesn't wake up then, as much as it seems he has – everyone knows that even the most outlandish dreams feel real, that they may even have their own spurious logic, but this is not real, cannot be. He has simply exchanged one dream for another. Happens all the time.
   In this dream he has been dreaming about his old skiing accident – for the second time that day, can you believe it? Only this time the tree he struck, the one which almost killed him, grows a rotted mouth like a squirming knothole. He snaps awake and finds himself sitting in Bobbi's rocking chair, too relieved by simple waking to care that he's stiff all over, and that his throat is now so sore that it feels like it's been lined with barbed wire.
   He thinks: I'm going to get up and make myself a dose of coffee and aspirin. Wasn't I going to do that before? He starts to get up and that's when Bobbi opens her eyes. That's also when he knows he is dreaming, must be, because green rays of light shoot from Bobbi's eyes – Gardener is reminded of Superman's X-ray vision in the comic-books, the way the artist always drew it in lime-colored beams. But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful … there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.
   Bobbi sits up slowly and looks around … looks toward Gardener. He tries to tell her no … Please don't put that light on me.
   No words come out and as that green light hits him he sees that Bobbi's eyes are blazing with it – at its source it is as green as emeralds, as bright as sun-fire. He cannot look at it, has to avert his eyes. He tries to bring an arm up to shield his face but he can't, his arm is too heavy. It'll burn, he thinks, it'll burn, and then in a few days the first sores will show up, you'll think they're pimples at first because that's what radiation sickness looks like when it starts, just a bunch of pimples, only these pimples never heal, they only get worse … and worse …
   He hears Arberg's voice, a disembodied holdover from the previous dream, and now there seems to be triumph in his drone: 'I knew you were going to crash, Gardener!'
   The light touches him … washes over him. Even with his eyes squeezed tightly shut it lights the darkness as green as radium watch-dials. But there is no real pain in dreams, and there is none here. The bright green light is neither hot nor cold. It is nothing. Except …
   His throat.
   His throat is no longer sore.
   And he hears this, clearly and unmistakably: '– per cent off! This is the sort of price reduction that may never be repeated! EVERYONE gets credit! Recliners! Waterbeds! Living room s – '
   The plate in his skull, talking again. Gone almost before it was fairly begun.
   Like his sore throat.
   And that green light was gone, too.
   Gardener opens his eyes … cautiously.
   Bobbi is lying on the couch, eyes shut, deeply asleep … just as she was. What's all this about rays shooting out of eyes? Good God!
   He sits in the rocking chair again. Swallows. No pain. The fever has gone down a lot, too.
   Coffee and aspirin, he thinks. You were going to get up for coffee and aspirin, remember?
   Sure, he thinks, settling more comfortably into the rocking chair and closing his eyes. But no one gets coffee and aspirin in a dream. I'll do it just as soon as I wake up.
   Gard, you are awake.
   But that, of course, could not be. In the waking world, people don't shoot green beams from their eyes, beams that cure fevers and sore throats. Dreams si, reality no.
   He crosses his arms over his chest and drifts away. He knows no more – either sleeping or waking -for the rest of that night.

5

   When Gardener woke up, bright light was streaming into his face through the western window. His back hurt like a bastard, and when he stood up his neck gave a wretched, arthritic creak that made him wince. It was quarter of nine. He looked at Bobbi and felt a moment of suffocating fear – in that moment he was sure Bobbi was dead. Then he saw that she was just so deeply, movelessly asleep that she gave a good impression of being dead. It was a mistake anyone might have made. Bobbi's chest rose in slow, steady pulls with long but even pauses in between. Gardener timed her and saw she was breathing no more than six times a minute.
   But she looked better this morning – not great, but a lot better than the haggard scarecrow who had reeled out to greet him last night.
   Doubt if I looked much better, he thought, and went into Bobbi's bathroom to shave.
   The face looking back from the mirror wasn't as bad as he had feared, but he noted with some dismay that his nose had bled again in the night – not a lot, but enough to have covered his philtrum and most of his upper lip. He got a facecloth out of the cupboard to the right of the sink and turned on the hot water to wet it down.
   He put the facecloth under the water flowing from the hot tap with all the absentmindedness of long habit – with Bobbi's water heater, you just about had time for a cup of coffee and a smoke before you got a lukewarm stream – and that was on a good d
   'Youch!'
   He pulled his hand back from water so hot it was steaming. Okay, that was what he got for assuming Bobbi was just going to go clipclopping down the road of life without ever getting her damned water heater fixed.
   Gardener put his scalded palm to his mouth and looked at the water coming out of the tap. It had already fogged the lower edge of the shaving mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet. He reached out, found the tap's handle almost too hot to touch, and used the facecloth to turn it off. Then he put in the rubber plug, drew a little more hot water – cautiously! – and added a generous dollop of cold. The pad of flesh below his left thumb had reddened a little.
   He opened the medicine cabinet and moved things around until he came to the prescription bottle of Valium with his own name on the label. If that stuff improves with age, it ought to be great, he thought. Still almost full. Well, what did he expect? Whatever Bobbi had been using, it sure as hell had been the opposite of Valium.
   Gardener didn't want it, either. He wanted what was behind it, if it was still
   Ali! Success!
   He pulled out a double-edge razor and a package of blades. He looked a little sadly at the layer of dust on the razor – it had been a long time since he'd shaved in the morning here at Bobbi's – and then rinsed it off. At least she didn't throw it out, he thought. That would have been worse than the dust.
   A shave made him feel better. He concentrated on it, drawing it out while his thoughts ran their own course.
   He finished, replaced the shaving stuff behind the Valium and cleaned up. Then he looked thoughtfully at the tap with the H on its handle, and decided to go down cellar and see what sort of magnificent water heater Bobbi had put in. The only other thing to do was watch Bobbi sleep, which she seemed to be doing well on her own.
   He crossed into the kitchen thinking that he really did feel well, especially now that the aches from a night in Bobbi's rocking chair were starting to work out of his back and neck. You're the guy who's never been able to sleep sitting up, right? he jeered softly at himself. Crashing out on breakwaters is more your style, right? But this ribbing was nothing like the harsh, barely coherent self-mockery of the day before. The one thing he always forgot in the grip of the hangovers and the terrible post-jag depressions was the feeling of regeneration that sometimes came later. You could wake up one day realizing you hadn't put any poison in your system the night before … the week before … maybe the whole month before … and you felt really good.
   As for what he had been afraid must be the onset of the flu, maybe even pneumonia – that was gone, too. No sore throat. No plugged nose. No fever. God knew he had been a perfect target for a germ, after eight days drinking, sleeping rough, and finally hitching back to Maine in his bare feet during a rainstorm. But it had passed off in the night. Sometimes God was good.
   He paused in the middle of the kitchen, his smile drifting away into a momentary expression that was puzzled and a little disquieted. A fragment of his dream – or dreams – came slipping back
   (radio ads in the night … does that have something to do with feeling well this morning?)
   and then it faded again. He dismissed it, content with the fact that he felt well and Bobbi looked well – better, anyway. If Bobbi wasn't awake by ten o'clock, ten-thirty at the latest, he would wake her up. If Bobbi felt better and spoke rationally, fine. They could discuss whatever had happened to her (SOMETHING sure did, Gardener thought, and wondered absently if she had gotten some terrible news report from home … a bulletin that would undoubtedly have been served up by Sister Anne). They would go on from there. If she still even slightly resembled the spaced-out and rather creepy Bobbi Anderson who had greeted him the night before, Gardener was going to call a doctor whether Bobbi liked it or not.
   He opened the cellar door and fumbled for the old-fashioned toggle switch on the wall. He found it. The switch was the same. The light wasn't. Instead of the feeble flow from two sixty-watt bulbs – the only illumination in Bobbi's cellar since time out of mind – the cellar lit up with a brisk white glare. It looked as bright as a discount department store down there. Gardener started down, hand reaching for the rickety old banister. He found a thick and solid new one instead. It was held firmly against the wall with new brass fittings. Some of the stair treads, which had been definitely queasy, had also been replaced.
   Gardener reached the bottom of the steps and stood looking around, his surprise now bordering on some stronger emotion – it was almost shock. That slightly moldy root-cellar smell was gone, too.
   She looked like a woman running on empty, no joke. Right out on the ragged edge. She couldn't even remember how many days it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. No wonder. I've heard of home improvement, but this is ridiculous. She couldn't have done it all herself, though. Could she? Of course not.
   But Gardener suspected that, somehow, Bobbi had.
   If Gardener had awakened here instead of on the breakwater at Arcadia Point, with no memory of the immediate past, he wouldn't have known he was in Bobbi's cellar, although he had been here countless times before. The only reason he was sure of it now was because he had gotten here from Bobbi's kitchen.
   That rooty smell wasn't entirely gone, but it was diminished. The cellar's dirt floor had been neatly raked – no, not just raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.
   Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's new worktable.
   Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study-lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition. and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good at nor very interested in small repairs.
   The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners … dozens of other items. Or hundreds.
   Then there were the batteries.
   There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs: C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts. Must be two hundred dollars' worth in there, Gardener thought, and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell – ?
   Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandise and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once . . . and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song -'Raindrops Keep Fallin'on My Head,' 'New York, New York,' 'Lara's Theme,' and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one and only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).
   Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to – did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing 'Lara's Theme' when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the use of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of modifying the thing somehow – hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.
   Half a dozen wires – four thin, two moderately thick – snaked between the radio (its instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.
   Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.
   Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.
   Here was something else he recognized – a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.
   But now she apparently had bought it and installed it.
   You can't say she's having a breakdown and 'that's all,' because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of 'that's all.' Crackups are probably never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.
   Do you believe that?
   Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns – you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshippers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.
   Over there was the water heater, a white, cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It looked the same, but …
   Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.
   She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, exactly where did Bobbi come by the know-how to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from Popular Mechanix, she must have really crammed.
   His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table – heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down – that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (apparently nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.
   What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about – trying to think about – the huge, the profligate amounts of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries. Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour. Don't forget that.
   What could have driven her to it?
   Gardener didn't know, he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backwards like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.
   Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It looked the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.
   That was when Gardener really sailed off the edge of the world.

6

   Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The small-bore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing – usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient … two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.
   Holy shit, how's she heating her water? he thought, and then he did look into the hatch, and then for a little while he froze completely.
   His mind seemed clear enough, yes, but that disconnected, floating sensation had come back – that feeling of separation. Ole Gard was going up again, up like a child's silver Puffer balloon. He knew he felt afraid, but this knowledge was dim, hardly important, compared to that dismal feeling of coming untethered from himself. No, Gard, Jesus! a mournful voice cried from deep inside him.
   He remembered going to the Fryeburg Fair when he was a little kid, no more than ten. He went into the Mirror Maze with his mother, and the two of them had gotten separated. That was the first time he had felt this odd sensation of separation from self, of drifting away, or above, his physical body and his physical (if there was such a thing) mind. He could see his mother, oh yes – five mothers, a dozen, a hundred mothers, some short, some tall, some fat, some scrawny. At the same time he saw five, a dozen, a hundred Gards. Sometimes he'd see one of his reflections join one of hers and he would reach out, almost absently, expecting to touch her slacks. Instead, there was only empty air … or another mirror.
   He had wandered for a long time, and he supposed he had panicked, but it hadn't felt like panic, and so far as he could remember, no one had acted like he had been in a panic when he finally floundered his way out – this only after fifteen minutes of twisting, turning, doubling back, and running into barriers of clear glass. His mother's brow had furrowed slightly for a moment, then cleared. That was all. But he had felt panic, just as he was feeling it now: that sensation of feeling your mind coming unbolted from itself, like a piece of machinery falling apart in zero-g.
   It comes … but it goes. Wait, Gard. Just wait for it to be over.
   So he squatted on his hunkers, looking into the open hatch at the base of Anderson's water tank, and waited for it to be over, as he had once waited for his feet to lead him down the correct passage and out of that terrible Mirror Maze at the Fryeburg Fair.
   The removal of the gas ring had left a round hollow area at the base of the tank. This area had been filled with a wild tangle of wires – red, green, blue, yellow. In the center of the tangle was a cardboard egg carton. HILLCREST FARMS, the blue printing read. GRADE A JUMBO. Sitting in each of the egg cradles was an EverReady alkaline D-cell battery, + terminals up. A tiny funnel-shaped gadget capped the terminals, and all of the wires seemed to either start – or end – in these caps. As he looked longer, in a state that did not precisely feel like panic, Gardener saw that his original impression – that the wires were in a wild jumble – was no more true than his original impression that the stuff on Bobbi's worktable was in a litter. No, there was order in the way the wires came out of or went into those twelve funnel-shaped caps – as few as two wires coming in or going out of some, as many as six coming in or going out of others. There was even order in the shape they made – it was a small arch. Some of the wires bent back into the funnels capped over other batteries, but most went to circuit boards propped against the sides of the water tank's heating compartment. They were from electronic toys made in Korea, Gardener surmised -too much cheap, silvery solder on corrugated fiberboard. A weird Gyro Gearloose conglomeration if ever there had been one … but this weird conglomeration of components was doing something. Oh yes. It was heating water fast enough to raise blisters, for one thing.
   In the center of the compartment, directly over the egg carton, in the arch formed by the wires, glowed a bright ball of light, no larger than a quarter but seemingly as bright as the sun.
   Gardener had automatically put his fist up to block out that savage glow, which shone out of the hatch in a solid white bar of light that cast his shadow long behind him on the dirt floor. He could look at it only by wincing his eyes down to the barest slits and then opening his fingers a little.
   As bright as the sun.
   Yes – only instead of yellow, it was a dazzling bluish-white, like a sapphire. Its glow pulsated and shifted slightly, then remained constant, then pulsated and shifted again: it was cycling.
   But where is the heat? Gardener thought, and that began to bring him back to himself. Where is the heat?
   He reached one hand up and laid it on the smooth, enameled side of the tank again – but only for a second. He snatched it away, thinking of the way the water had smoked coming out of the tap in the bathroom. There was hot water in the tank, all right, and plenty of it – by all rights it should boil away to steam and blow Bobbi Anderson's tank all over the basement. It wasn't doing that, obviously, and that was a mystery … but it was a minor mystery compared to the fact that he wasn't feeling any heat coming out of the hatch – none at all. He should have burned his fingers on the little knob you pulled to open the hatch, and when it was open, that coin-sized sun should have burned the skin right off his face. So … ?
   Slowly, hesitantly, Gardener reached toward the opening with his left hand, keeping his right fisted before his eyes to block out the worst of the glow. His mouth was pulled down in a wince as he anticipated a burn.
   His splayed fingers slipped into the hatchway . . . and then struck something yielding. He thought later it was a little like pushing your fingers into a stretched nylon stocking – only this gave just so much and then stopped. Your fingers never punched through, as they would have punched through a nylon stocking.
   But there was no barrier. None, at least, that he could see.
   He stopped pressing and the invisible membrane gently pushed his fingers back out of the hatchway. He looked at his fingers and saw they were shaking.
   It's a force-field, that's why I'm not getting burned. Some sort of a force-field that damps heat. Dear God, I've walked into a science-fiction story from Startling Stories. Right around 1947, I'd guess. I wonder if I made the cover? If I did, who drew me? Virgil Finlay? Hannes Bok?
   His hand was beginning to shake harder. He groped for the little door, missed it, found it again, and slammed it shut, cutting out that dazzling flood of white light. He lowered his right hand slowly but he could still see an afterimage of that tiny sun, the way one can see a flashbulb after it has gone off in one's face. Only what Gardener saw was a large green fist floating in the air, with bright, ectoplasmic blue between the fingers.
   The afterimage faded. The shakes didn't.
   Gardener had never wanted a drink so badly in his life.

7

   He got one in Anderson's kitchen.
   Bobbi didn't drink much, but she kept what she called 'the staples' in a cabinet behind the pots and pans: bottle of gin, bottle of Scotch, bottle of bourbon, bottle of vodka. Gardener pulled out the bourbon – some cut-rate brand, but beggars couldn't be choosers – poured an inch into a plastic tumbler, and downed it.
   Better watch your step, Gard. You're tempting fate.
   Except he wasn't. Right now he almost would have welcomed a jag, but the cyclone had gone somewhere else to blow … at least for the time being. He poured another two inches of bourbon into the glass, contemplated it for a moment, then poured most of it down the sink. He put the bottle back, and added water and ice cubes, converting what had been liquid dynamite into a civilized drink.
   He thought the kid on the beach would have approved.
   He supposed the dreamlike calm that had surrounded him when he came out of the Mirror Maze, and felt again now, was a defense against just lying down on the floor and screaming until he lost consciousness. The calm was all right. What scared him was how fast his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that none of it was true – that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Incredibly, his mind was suggesting that what he had seen when he opened the hatch in the heater's base was a very bright light bulb – two hundred watts, say.
   It wasn't a light bulb and it wasn't hallucination. It was something like a sun, very small and hot and bright, floating in an arch of wires, over an egg carton filled with D-cells. Now you can go crazy if you want, or get Jesus, or get drunk but you saw what you saw and leave us not gild the lily, all right? All right.
   He checked on Anderson and saw she was still sleeping like a stone. Gardener had decided to wake Bobbi up by ten-thirty if she hadn't awakened on her own; he looked at his watch now, and was astonished to see it was only twenty minutes past nine. He had been in the cellar much less time than he had thought.
   Thinking of the cellar called up the surreal vision of that miniature sun hanging suspended in its arch of wires, glowing like a superhot tennis ball . . . and thinking about that brought back the unpleasant sense that his mind was uncoupling itself. He pushed it away. It didn't want to go. He pushed harder, telling himself he was simply not going to think about it anymore until Bobbi woke up and told him just what was going on around here.
   He looked down at his arms and saw that he was sweating.

8

   Gardener took his drink out back, where he found more evidence of Bobbi's almost supernatural burst of activity.
   Her Tomcat tractor was standing in front of the large shed to the left of the garden – nothing unusual about that, it was where she most commonly left it when the weatherman said it wasn't going to get rained on. But even from twenty feet away Gardener could see that Anderson had done something radical to the Tomcat's motor.
   No. No more. Forget this shit, Gard. Go home.
   There was nothing dreamy or disconnected about that voice – it was harsh, vital with panic and scared dismay. For a moment Gardener felt himself on the verge of giving in to it … and then he thought what an abysmal betrayal that would be – of Bobbi, of himself. The thought of Bobbi had kept him from killing himself yesterday. And by not killing himself, he thought he had kept her from doing the same thing. The Chinese had a proverb: 'If you save a life, you are responsible for it.' But if Bobbi needed help, how was he supposed to give it? Didn't finding out begin with trying to find out just what had been going on out here?
   He knocked back the end of the drink, set the empty glass on the top back step, and walked toward the Tomcat. He was distantly aware of the crickets singing in the high grass. He wasn't drunk, not squiffy, as far as he could tell; the booze seemed to have shot right past his entire nervous system. Gave it a miss, as the British said.
   (like the leprechauns that made the shoes tap-tap-tappety-tap while the cobbler slept)
   But Bobbi hadn't been sleeping, had she? Bobbi had been driven until she dropped – literally dropped – into Gardener's arms.
   (tap-tap-tappety-tap knock-knock-knockety-knock late last night and the night before Tommyknockers Tommyknockers knocking at the door)
   Standing by the Tomcat, looking into the open engine compartment, Gardener didn't just shiver – he shuddered like a man dying of cold, his upper teeth biting into his lower lip, his face pale, his temples and forehead covered with sweat.
   (they fixed the water heater and the Tomcat. too there's lots of things the Tommyknockers do)
   The Tomcat was a small working vehicle which would have been almost useless on a big spread where farming was the main work. It was bigger than a riding lawnmower but smaller than the smallest tractor Deere or Farmall had ever made, but just right for someone who kept a garden that was just a little too big to be called a plot – and that was the case here. Bobbi had a garden of about an acre and a half -beans, cukes, peas, corn, radishes, and potatoes. No carrots, no cabbages, no zucchini, no squash.
   'I don't grow what I don't like,' she had told Gardener once. 'Life's too short.'
   The Tomcat was fairly versatile; it had to be – even a well-off gentleman farmer would have trouble justifying the purchase of a $2,500 mini-tractor on the basis of a one-acre garden. It could roto-till, mow grass with one attachment and cut hay with another; it could haul stuff over rough terrain (she had used it as a skidder in the fall, and so far as Gardener knew Bobbi had gotten stuck only once), and in the winter she attached a snow-blower unit and cleared her driveway in half an hour. It was powered by a sturdy four-cc engine.
   Or had been.
   The engine was still in there, but now it was tarted up with the weirdest array of gadgets and attachments imaginable – Gardener found himself thinking of the doorbell/radio thing on the table in Anderson's basement, and wondering if Bobbi meant to put it on the Tomcat soon . . . maybe it was radar, or something. A single bewildered bark of laughter escaped him.
   A mayonnaise jar jutted from one side of the engine. It was filled with a fluid too colorless to be gasoline and screwed into a brass fitting on the engine head. Sitting on the cowling was something that would have looked more at home on a Chevy Nova or SuperSport: the air scoop of a supercharger.
   The modest carb had been replaced with a scrounged four-barrel. Bobbi had had to cut a hole through the cowling to make room for it.
   And there were wires – wires everywhere, snaking in and out and up and down and all around, making connections that made absolutely no sense . . . at least, not as far as Gardener could see.
   He looked at the Tomcat's rudimentary instrument panel, started to look away … and then his gaze snapped back, his eyes widening.
   The Tomcat had a stick shift, and the gearing pattern had been printed on a square of metal bolted to the dashboard above the oil-pressure gauge. Gardener had seen that square of metal often enough; he had driven the Tomcat frequently over the years. Before it had always been:
   3
   N 4
   2 R
   Now, something new had been added – something which was just simple enough to be terrifying:
   3
   N 4 UP
   2 R
   You don't believe that, do you?
   I don't know.
   Come on, Gard -flying tractors? Give me a break!
   She's got a miniature sun in her water heater.
   Bullshit. I think it might have been a light bulb, a bright one, like a two-hundred-watt
   It was not a light bulb!
   Okay, all right, calm down. It just sounds like an ad for a really E. T. ripoff, that's all. 'You'll believe a tractor can fly.'
   Shut up.
   Or 'John Deere, phone home.' How's that?
   He stood in Anderson's kitchen again, looking longingly at the cabinet where the booze was. He shifted his eyes away – it was not easy because they felt as if they had gained weight – and walked back into the living room. He saw that Bobbi had changed positions, and that her respiration was moving along a bit more rapidly. First signs of waking up. Gardener glanced at his watch again and saw it was nearly ten o'clock. He went over to the bookcase by Bobbi's desk, wanting to find something to read until she came around, something that would take his mind off this whole business for a little while.
   What he saw on Bobbi's desk, beside the battered old typewriter, was in some ways the worst shock of all. Shocking enough, anyway, so that he barely noticed another change: a roll of perforated computer paper hung on the wall above and behind the desk and typewriter like a giant roll of paper towels.

9

   THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS
   A novel by Roberta Anderson
   Gardener put the top sheet aside, face-down, and saw his own name – or rather, the nickname only he and Bobbi used.
   For Gard, who's always there when I need him.
   Another shudder worked through him. He put the second sheet aside face-down on the first.
   In those days, just before Kansas began to bleed, the buffalo were still plentiful on the plains – plentiful enough, anyway, for poor men, white and Indian alike, to be buried in buffalo skins rather than in coffins.
   'Once you get a taste of buffaler meat, you'll never want what come off'n a cow again,' the old-timers said, and they must have believed what they said, because these hunters of the plains, these buffalo soldiers, seemed to exist in a world of hairy, humpbacked ghosts – all about them they carried the memory of the buffalo, the smell of the buffalo – the smell, yes, because many of them smeared buff-tallow on their necks and faces and hands to keep the prairie sun from burning them black. They wore buffalo teeth in necklaces and sometimes in their ears; their chaps were of buffalo hide; and more than one of these nomads carried a buffalo penis as a good luck charm or guarantee of continued potency.
   Ghosts themselves, following herds that crossed the short-wire grass like the great clouds which cover the prairie with their shadows; the clouds remain but the great herds are gone … and so are the buffalo soldiers, madmen from wastes that had as yet never known a fence, men who came striding out of nowhere and went striding back into that same place, men with buffalo-hide moccasins on their feet and bones clicking about their necks; ghosts out Of time, out of a place that existed just before the whole country began to bleed.
   Late in the afternoon of August 24th, 1848, Robert Howell, who would die at Gettysburg not quite fifteen years later, made camp near a small stream far out along the Nebraska panhandle, in that eerie section known as the Sand Hill Country. The stream was small but the water smelled sweet enough …
   Gardener was forty pages into the story and utterly absorbed when he heard Bobbi Anderson call sleepily:
   'Gard? Gard, are you still around?'
   'I'm here, Bobbi,' he said, and stood up, dreading what would come next and already half-believing he had gone insane. That had to be it, of course. There could not be a tiny sun in the bottom of Bobbi's hot-water tank, nor a new gear on her Tomcat which suggested levitation … but it would have been easier for him to believe either of those things than to believe that Bobbi had written a four-hundred-page novel called The Buffalo Soldiers in the three weeks or so since Gard had last seen her – a novel that was, just incidentally, the best thing she had ever written. Impossible, yeah. Easier – hell, saner – to believe he had gone crazy and simply leave it at that.
   If only he could.

Chapter 9. Anderson Spins a Tale

1

   Bobbi was getting off the couch slowly, wincing, like an old woman.
   'Bobbi – ' Gardener began.
   'Christ, I ache all over,' Anderson said. 'And I've got to change my – never mind. How long did I sleep?'
   Gardener glanced at his watch. 'Fourteen hours, I guess. A little more. Bobbi, your new book – '
   'Yeah. Hold that thought until I get back.' She walked slowly across the floor toward the bathroom, unbuttoning the shirt she had slept in. As she hobbled toward the bathroom, Gardener got a good look – a much better one than he wanted, actually – of just how much weight Bobbi had lost. This went beyond scrawniness to the point of emaciation.
   She stopped, as if aware Gardener was looking at her, and without looking around she said: 'I can explain everything, you know.'
   'Can you?' Gardener asked.